Posts Tagged With: Thomas Hughes

Two of us ramblers recently took a walk up Jericho way looking for a hidden cemetery called St. Sepulchre’s, a Victorian graveyard on the site of an old farm. Despite containing still more examples of vandalism and neglect amongst Oxford cemeteries, as well as a great many graves completely overgrown with grass and briers, it was a beautiful spring day and we were able to take some charming photographs of the scene and setting. Quite a few leading Oxonians, masters of colleges, and mayors are interred at St. Sepulchre’s, the most famous probably being Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College and arguably the most famous translator of Plato’s dialogues and other classical works into English.

Grave of Benjamin Jowett

Additionally, a highly interesting group of stones mark the places where the Sisters of the Society of the Holy and Undivided Trinity (commonly called Sisters of Mercy) were laid to rest. These Anglican nuns had deep-rooted connections to the Reverend Dr. E. B. Pusey and the Oxford Movement, and were led by Mother Superior Marian Rebecca Hughes – the first woman to take vows as an Anglican nun since Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries during the English Reformation. Interestingly, Mother Marian was also the sister of Thomas Hughes, the author of the classic Victorian school boy novel Tom Brown’s School Days.

Grave of Eight Year Old John Henry Silliman

Ah – the gems of largely forgotten places and memorials to our predecessors that exist in “this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England!”

“…either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain….Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?…What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again.”